Most operators sell the same seat through three or four doors: their own website, a reseller marketplace, the phone, and occasionally a hotel desk. Each door has a different cost and the same risk, which is that two of them sell the last seat within the same minute. This page is about deciding which channels are worth having and how availability has to move between them, written for the operator paying the commission rather than for the marketplace collecting it.
Your own booking widget is the cheapest seat you will ever sell
A booking widget on your own site costs you the software and the card fee and nothing else, which makes every seat sold through it worth materially more than the same seat sold through a marketplace. That is the argument for making it genuinely good: fast, honest about availability, working on a phone, and not asking for an account. Everything you spend improving it is recovered on every booking rather than on the first one.
What a reseller actually costs, and what it buys
A marketplace charges a percentage and in exchange brings demand you would not have reached, particularly from travellers who have not heard of you. The honest way to judge it is not the commission rate but what share of those bookings were genuinely incremental. Seats a marketplace sells that would have come through your own site anyway are seats you bought back at a discount, and that is the number worth watching over a season.
Availability has to move in both directions
The oversell that hurts is the one where your own site sells the last seat while a reseller is still showing it. Any channel integration worth having pushes a sale on any door to every other door within seconds, not on a schedule. Ask specifically whether the connection is two-way and how fast, and test it by selling the last seat on your own site and refreshing the reseller's page.
Questions people ask about booking channels
Which booking channels are worth having?
Your own site always, because it is the cheapest seat you sell. A marketplace is worth its commission only to the extent that its bookings are incremental; judge it over a season on that rather than on the headline rate.
How fast does channel availability need to sync?
Within seconds, in both directions. A sale on any door has to close the seat everywhere else immediately, because the oversell that damages you is the one that happens in the same minute on two channels.
Can I charge less on my own booking widget?
Usually not, because most marketplaces require rate parity. The lever you do have is what is included and what the remaining seats on a near departure cost across every channel at once, which is a pricing decision rather than a discount.